Animation using Timeline: Road to RealTime part 2

4 min readJul 30, 2021

Click here if you want to watch the previous part

Adding animation to characters

Setting a root position for animation

It is a good idea to create an empty game object called RootPosition because it can be used as a reference for a group of characters when animating them

After creating it, set its position as desired and drag and drop the Shanks’ game object into it as its child

Possible issue

Create a new Animation track
Select the AnimMaster_Sequence game object and drag and drop the Shanks’ game object into Timeline
Select Add Animation track
Choose the HumanoidIdle animation
Place the new animation clip at the beginning of the Timeline

Press play in Timeline

Nothing happens. Why?

Select the Shanks’ game object in the hierarchy

It shows a new Animator with Controller and Avatar values empty

If you search the HumanoidIdle animation in the project window, click on edit in the inspector

And later on Rig, it will show this

It requires an Avatar, but as we saw before, the game object doesn’t have one

What happened?

The game object that we selected is a parent game object.
It allows you to set its Transform values, but it didn’t have anything else.
The Animator was added when it was dragged into the Timeline

So, let’s remove its Animator component and search in the children game objects

As you can see, the Shanks_Basic game object has the required Avatar

Adding animations to characters in Timeline

Select the AnimMaster_Sequence game object in the hierarchy
Remove the previous Shanks Animator that it contains
Drag and drop the Shanks_Basic game object into the Timeline
Select Add Animation track
Add a new animation from clip. Select HumanoidIdle
Place the animation clip at the beginning of the Timeline

Press play in the Timeline

It’s working fine. Awesome!

Now select another animation (cyan triangle) from the project folder and add it next to the actual one. I’ll select HumanoidRun

Continuous and looping animation

To make the character run continuously, select the Run animation clip and select the Continue option in Post-Extrapolate.

For looping the animation (to control how many times I want the animation to be executed), select Hold in Post-Extrapolate, click on the animation and drag it to the right

Now you can control how many times you want the animation to be played

Blending animations

Right now, the character will play the Idle animation and suddenly will run.

To fix that (to blend both animations) select the Run animation and drag it a bit into the Idle one.

Animation Transform offset

Currently, the animations are played in a starting position (0,0,0)
If we add an animation after running

To fix that, right click on the last animation and select Match Offsets to previous clip

Retargetting animations

It is to use the same animations for several characters
These are the new current animations

Drag and drop some other characters to the hierarchy
Select the AninMaster_Sequence game object
One by one, select the child that contains the Animator (_Basic) component and drag and drop it into the Timeline. Select Add Animation Track